The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Nothing at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

6. Being and Being Grounded

125 Daniel O. Dahlstrom 6 S Being and Being Grounded I. The Age of Leibniz The world today stands under the spell of Leibniz’s thought. Or, perhaps more carefully, we might say that the world today stands under the spell of what Leibniz thought only too well. With uncanny perceptiveness, he managed to articulate a basic principle of thinking and being in the early modern world that is arguably as vital today as it was at the outset of the eighteenth century. Looking for reasons, causes, and grounds of things was, to be sure, hardly novel then; indeed, it was second nature for human beings long before Leibniz’s day. Yet Leibniz possessed the philosopher ’s gift of articulating and thereby giving wings to the principle under which humanity, particularly in the modern age, labors with an ever-mounting sense of urgency. The mantra of his genius has, indeed, become the mantra of an age fully committed to the promise of science and technology. I am referring, of course, to what has been called, since Leibniz’s time, the principle of sufficient reason. Many of the foregoing sentiments were voiced by Heidegger in lectures and an address held some fifty years ago and published in 1957 as Der Satz vom Grund, the German abbreviation for Leibniz’s principle of reason.1 According to Heidegger, only by looking back at what Leibniz was thinking when he elaborated the principle of sufficient reason can we understand our present age. “The thinking of Leibniz,” he contends, not only prefigures mathematical logic and the subjectivity of German 1. M. Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 51 (hereafter “SvG 51“). All translations into English are my own. 126  Daniel O. Dahlstrom idealism; it also “bears and stamps the chief tendency of what we can name the metaphysics of the modern age, thought broadly enough” (SvG 65). Thus, Heidegger insists that the name “Leibniz” by no means stands for some by-gone system of philosophy. In today’s seemingly unrestricted “technological-scientific construction of the world,” he contends, the principle of sufficient reason first comes fully into its own. In terminology perhaps more familiar a half-century ago, Heidegger emphasizes how the self-proclaimed “atomic age” adapts human thinking to modern technology and underwrites computational thinking to give “scientific thinking an axiomatic form.” Modernity in this sense is only beginning, Heidegger submits, and modernity is the age of Leibniz, the age in which the principle of sufficient reason is the supreme principle (SvG 40f, 65f). Heidegger gives mixed signals about this development. Sometimes he tells his students that this modern development is both necessary and promising, as is retracing the path through it (SvG 41f, 66). More often he makes it clear that he regards the unrestricted pursuit of reasons and grounds (Grund) as a threat, a threat to another sort of ground (Boden), the soil that is allegedly vital to human flourishing. The fact that Heidegger continues to employ the term Boden in a way that reverberates with its checkered past use (by him and others) in National Socialist rhetoric is hardly accidental. It remains to be seen whether it can have a redeeming significance that is not parasitic on a parasite. Nevertheless, if we can manage to bracket these important political ramifications of his rhetoric for the moment, we can readily appreciate the experience motivating his lament about modernity, captivated by the principle of sufficient reason. As he puts it, the more doggedly we pursue the grounds and reasons for things, the more uprooted we seem to be; the more we penetrate the causes of things in the sciences, the more that vital ground (Boden) recedes from view (SvG 60; SvG 137f). Heidegger also bemoans the fact that though modern science—and thereby modern technology and the modern university as well—are beholden to this principle, consideration of it is not to be found in the sciences themselves or, for that matter, in the university (SvG 48f, 56f). In fact, Heidegger submits, given the way the sciences correspond to the demand contained in the principle of sufficient reason, they are unable to reflect on it (SvG 59). But it is not only “the usual scientific-technical way of presenting things” that fails here; the philosophical doctrine that the principle Being and Being Grounded   127 of sufficient reason is an immediately illuminating principle “evades the decisive questions of thinking” (SvG...